Get That Life: How I Started a Multimillion-Dollar DIY Company

When Brit Morin quit her job at Google, she knew she wanted to start her own business. She just didn't know what that was.

Brit Morin grew up in San Antonio, Texas, taking apart sewing machines to see how they worked and making beach bags out of Capri Sun containers. But when it came to her career, she fueled that creative curiosity into technology rather than art or design. After rising in the ranks at the nation's top tech companies, she had an epiphany: "It dawned on me that this generation of women has grown up with technology but not a lot of creative skills," she says. "I thought, how can we use technology to foster creativity among this new generation of women?"

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Brit + Co was born, and within four months she had raised more than 1 million dollars in venture capital. In just over three years, Brit + Co has become an iconic digital destination for makers, trendsetters, and women looking to learn to execute all those pins they save on Pinterest, while Morin has become a regular guest commentator on Today, CNN, and Yahoo.

Morin, 29, talks about walking away from Google without a job, returning to her creative roots, and the challenges of keeping her never-ending ideas from getting the best of her business.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I knew I wanted to move to Silicon Valley and learn more about computers and the Internet. I just fell in love with technology and the potential of everything the Internet had to offer.

So I went to the college that would accept the most transfer credits and AP courses and allow me to graduate as quickly as possible. I tested out of almost two years of school at the University of Texas at Austin [studying business and communications] and graduated with my bachelor's degree in 2.5 years.

I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I couldn't even drink yet. My friends in college thought I was so stupid for missing out on the four best years of my life. But I was so ready to start living my own life and absorb Silicon Valley culture. Social life was different for me in college. I didn't go to as many parties as my friends did. I didn't join a sorority because I knew I couldn't make a long-term commitment. I was constantly traveling back and forth from Silicon Valley to Austin for internships. It was hard, but it was worth it for where I wanted to go.

Diana Mulvihill

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During my sophomore year in college, I got an internship at Browster. It was an Internet plug-in that let you hover over a link when you're in Google search results and see a sneak peek of what that website looks like. I helped them with their product development and collaborated on new features and advised them on how to make the experience more user-friendly, especially to a younger demographic. This was a semester-long internship, and I flew out two to three times to Silicon Valley to work with the team and did the rest remotely from Austin.

I had another internship with Radar, which was a mobile photo-sharing app. This was back in 2005, when no one had heard of a camera phone or much less knew what a data plan was or how to send an image to someone else through a phone. That was an amazing experience because I learned so much about mobile.

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Back in the day, Facebook was still a new platform just for college students, and companies would use it to advertise internships. I remember seeing ads for different internships within my own Facebook page. Radar was one of them. I helped them with product development and marketing, specifically creating campaigns to help reach college-age students. I also acted as a campus rep for them at UT Austin. This lasted two years during the end of my sophomore and combined junior/senior year. I flew out many times during the internship. There was no consistent cadence of my travel. It just became part of my routine.

I saw a flyer on campus to apply to be an Apple campus rep. I emailed them and got the job. My job was to convince students to use Apple products and also act as a "genius" on campus and help students with any hardware issues.

Diana Mulvihill

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I moved to San Francisco to work at Apple's Cupertino office in the summer of 2006, then stayed on remotely in a part-time job back in Austin. It was an internship with iTunes. I helped them launch new features as well as new marketing programs. I also helped program the iTunes Store every week, working on which artists and albums got featured.

I was able to fly back and forth during school because these companies paid for my travel and also allowed me to work remotely while I was in school. These companies wanted to reach a younger audience. I helped them think about how to activate people in their 20s and how the products might need to change to be more user-friendly.

I submitted a résumé to Google sometime during my last year. I went through several rounds of phone interviews with them and ultimately got a job offer. I had not yet even begun my full-time job search. The Google offer happened very quickly, and I instantly took it and moved right out to San Francisco after graduating.

I was hired to work on the Google Maps team in product marketing. My role there was to figure out how to get more people to use Google Maps. We thought of different types of product launches, like Street View and driving directions, Google Maps for mobile, and triangulation — that's when you open your phone and it tells you where you are. I also got to work on Google Earth. I don't think I realized how significant a job at Google was at that point. It was a big tech company, but this was an era of Google right before a lot of big products within Google started blowing up. I feel like I got in the door when it was a mid- to large-size tech company. Now it's obviously extra, extra large and incredibly successful.

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Diana Mulvihill

After working on Google Maps for a year and a half, I moved over to the search team as a product marketing manager and worked for Marissa Mayer. I was responsible for developing new products and features to drive growth to all our search properties and also managed the marketing for these products. I got to work on the main search that everyone knows and loves, iGoogle, Google Finance, Google Book search, and Google Image search.

Marissa was my biggest mentor at Google. I learned so much from her in an indirect way — just from being around her and being in meetings with her and learning how she delegates. I really did and do look up to her so much. She eventually became an investor in Brit + Co as well. We're driven in our own ways, and we both also got lucky in our own ways. Part of this industry is luck. The rest of it is drive.

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I got asked to move over to the YouTube team to help launch Google TV. A lot of my job was trying to convince people why these two worlds of linear television and streaming Internet should coexist. People didn't understand why you'd want a large computer on your wall. Working on Google TV was like building a startup within Google. It was a brand-new product, so we had to ask for budget, create marketing campaigns, and validate it. I loved the experience of working with just 10 to 20 people on a new type of business. I felt confident in myself that I could do this outside of Google as well. And I thought if I was going to take that leap, it's better to take it when I'm younger and have room to risk than when I'm older.

I decided to leave Google in 2011 after working there about four years — without a job. I knew I wanted to start a business of my own, but I didn't know what that was yet. I saved a lot while I was working at Google. I had about six to seven months to decide what I wanted to do. I was feeling overworked and a little burnt out, and I wanted to take a couple of months to clear my mind before I decided what I was going to put my heart and soul into for the next few years.

I left the number-one place to work. But I think the coolest part about Google and the people who work there is that they really foster an entrepreneurial spirit. As I was leaving, everyone I worked with, including my managers and mentors, told me that whenever I wanted to come back, the door was open.

Diana Mulvihill

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For six weeks, I just traveled all over Central and South America with my girlfriends. Then I came back and joined this place called TechShop in San Francisco, which is like a gym for making things. I realized I was fairly burnt out with the Internet and technology, and really wanted to return to that part of my childhood where I loved to just make and create. They had all these modern machines, like 3-D printers and laser cutters, as well as a lot of traditional machines, like screen printers and letterpress machines and sewing machines. I started going at least once a week.

It was a wonderful immersive and creative experience, and really opened my mind to how the world of creativity was changing as technology was improving. As I was at TechShop, I noticed that a lot of the people around me were men. At this same time, Pinterest had just launched, and that community was largely all women and the thing they were pinning the most were DIY projects and creative types of ideas. I realized this generation of women has no idea how to cook or sew or decorate or do any of these domestic things. There was no resource to help them learn and create as a community.

So much of what I wanted Brit + Co to be about is learning and teaching and feeling accessible. I didn't want women to feel like they couldn't do it because they weren't good enough. We all have things that we gravitate toward. It's hard to be really great at all things. I knew that with this generation also being the social media generation, the best way to connect with this audience was to be the real me, as a woman who has grown up the same way they did.

My first step was to just start making things. I think a lot of people when they're starting businesses get hung up on making it perfect as opposed to just putting the idea out there and seeing if it's sticky. I launched the company by myself from my apartment. I incorporated as a business and started building the site. I hired a freelance designer to help me put the website together, but I also wrote code.

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I had to seed the website with a lot of content, and it was mostly projects and tutorials as well as easy ideas for being more creative in your home — whether that's an idea for cooking, decorating, crafting, or getting ready for the day. I launched the site in November 2011, and just started putting it out there and building a social media following on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. I'd post my content to these networks and very rapidly started building up followers across all the platforms. I knew it was resonating and that I needed more content. So I hired a creative director, who is our resident maker. She started coming to my apartment in San Francisco, and we would just make anything that inspired us. We would photograph the best we could, write about how we did it, and post it, hoping they would catch fire and inspire others to give it a try. My next hires were two engineers. I was paying everyone out-of-pocket for about four months. By the time we hit 100,000 to 200,000 monthly users, I started going to investors.

Diana Mulvihill

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We just went for it like anyone launching a company in Silicon Valley. We made the pitch deck about the business, identified the huge gap we saw in the market, how Brit + Co could fill it, how we envisioned ourselves making money, who our team was, and who we wanted to bring on. I started with mentors and my network, and expanded outreach from there. Ultimately we found a few investors that believed in our business and wanted to support us. We raised a $1.25 million seed round in April 2012.

We then moved out of my apartment into office space in San Francisco. I grew the team to about 10 people that year, and a year later, we had about 600,00 to 700,000 monthly unique users.

To monetize, we ran ads very early on and mostly worked with advertisers on a reactive basis — they came to us; we didn't go pitch them. Advertising is pretty straightforward as a business. We have a large, engaged audience, and they want to get their brand in front of that audience. So, we just started thinking about how to pair those two things together.

The first year, we probably had 10 to 20 advertisers. Once we brought on a real sales team, that number shot up significantly. We've worked with over 100 brands at this point, and most of them are returning to advertise with us. We also now have two additional revenue streams: e-learning and e-commerce. People can take classes on our site to learn new skills, and we supply them with DIY kits and tools. And they can also buy products they see featured on the site. Makers can also sell back their merchandise in our marketplace. It's sort of like Etsy, but it's curated by our editors.

As the business grew, we raised another $6.3 million in Series A financing. Seed funding is typically the first round of funding that helps companies get off the ground. It's enough to keep the lights on as they get their vision together and experiment a bit. Series A is the round after the seed round, generally bigger, and allows companies to really start hiring substantial teams and building out product streams. You definitely need to have proven your market, growth, and engagement at this stage.

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The hardest part sometimes is having a creative mindset. I know how big this business can be, and I have a never-ending stream of ideas for all the things I want to do. But to build a successful business, you have to focus and take it one day and one step at a time. It can be hard to prioritize.

We're now close to 50 employees. We have millions of dollars in revenue a year. And we reach about 10 million women every month.

Diana Mulvihill

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Every day is totally different. I usually wake up at 6 a.m. and have an hour of my own time before my son [born in October 2014] wakes up. I spend an hour or so with him, getting ready for the day, then I am in the office around 9 a.m. I have a strict policy about only allowing meetings on my calendar from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. That leaves me with a few hours in the morning to get email and other large projects done. My meetings are totally different depending on the day. One day it's meeting with our partners at Hallmark to talk about a big campaign, then interviewing and recruiting a designer or engineer, then doing a one-on-one with an executive on my team. Throughout the week, I have internal meetings with every team to work on product and engineering plans, design reviews, marketing campaigns, etc.

I'm genuinely passionate about this business. I was one of those women who was insecure about my own creativity, and I want to help other women and girls believe in themselves. I'm inspired daily by our makers and their varied passions and talents. I'm constantly trying projects that our community comes up with. My latest obsessions have been clay and pottery and calligraphy. I even took one of our own e-classes to learn how to do calligraphy.

I can do this for the rest of my life. I have years' worth of ideas.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Brit + Co. raised its seed round in April 2011. It was 2012. This has been corrected.

Get That Life is a weekly series that reveals how successful, talented, creative women got to where they are now. Check back each Monday for the latest interview.